William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

The white-armed woman holds sway over her gold-adorned hall. She adorns herself in kennings which dazzle my wearied eyes. My bedazzlement is my failure. (Sometimes when I see Noh actors from the back, their strangely flat beetleness, the way their arms can outstretch and freeze; or when I lose my way amidst the music of the chorus in brown plaid kimonos in front of that pine tree, staring straight ahead, then I forget that movement of striped kimono sleeves will extend into wings and grasp something supernaturally black. The real world is stylized into slow neutrality here; for the sake of what will come, it must be so. The boy’s pure high voice answers the man who kneels down on the polished floor. In the audience, old couples are following along character by character in well-thumbed or immaculate books. I envy their knowledge. This is the lesson I must take to heart: A perception of monotony is the result either of ignorance or a failure of attention. That may not always be true; sometimes the performer fails; if this book reads monotonously to you the failure may well be mine; but it is in my interest always to make the grandest assumptions about whatever offers itself before me. This boy in his robe and conical hat, he has what Zeami calls the false flower of his youth; let it be his youth, then, not his talent, that I reverence; or rather let it be his youth as tightly controlled by the play and by his training. They adjust his hat for him; they give him a bamboo staff taller than he is. A scowling man in a tapering black hat and a kimono of black, white and gold haunts the stage. Between periods of immobility and silence a sudden shimmering noise beats from a triangle of outstretched hands; I glimpse the child, then get overwhelmed by a line of elaborately identical kimono’d men all pivoting at once.) If I truly wish to see the loveliness of a bygone Norsewoman, then I must gaze at her with all my might, until my eyes burn out. Within their seeming sameness, what do the kennings mean?

The phrase “bright goddess of the serpent’s bed” makes me think on Sigrún in Helgi’s howe; perhaps the snakes are already crawling across the corpse she holds in her arms, brightly alone in the treasure-strewn darkness. If I were brave enough, I would be the one in there with her. I am sometimes ready to lay myself down in the serpent’s bed, believing as I do that love of a woman is the most glorious doom that can befall a man.

Andrew Wyeth’s Helga Pictures

Helga Testorf, or her painted semblance, gazes down into the dark earth. An ominous grove almost silhouettes itself upon the high horizon. The world is wall and grave-core, crooked block of almost-night. Against this darkness, far more richly than the pale scrap of sky, Helga’s hair is shining, gold in a serpent’s hoard, flickering fire. Although the painter once remarked that he was striving for the “frozen motion” in Rembrandt, wherein “time is holding its breath for an instant — and for eternity,” he also said: “I would like to paint so nothing is at rest in my work. Nothing is frozen. I would like people to sense even in those paintings with brilliant passages of sunlight, that the sunlight is not really still but that you can really see the passage of the sun.” And indeed, light of some kind (probably more supernatural than the sun) alters upon the back of her head. Each hair is a wire amalgamated from slightly different proportions of gold and copper than its neighbor. Helga’s braids shine alternately light and dark. A sliver of reddish-orange collar ends her pale neck. And all around her, the earth has been worked like a dark wool coat. It seems to be made of fibers. The Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art sees in this painter’s textures “a similarity of stroke and surface applied alternatively to field grasses, animal fur, and human skin and hair.”

Helga Testorf stands gazing into the weave of the earth, where all of us must go. What does she see? When the shite of “Izutsu” stares down into the well, she discovers that her reflection has changed into her lover’s. He and she are long dead, of course; perhaps each is the other’s opposite. Life looks down into the weave of the earth and sees, I imagine, death. In this painting called “Farm Road,” Helga Testorf, bright goddess of the serpent’s bed, spies death, or love, or herself, or some other entity — possibly the tuber of the true flower; call it the Unknown. As Kofumi-san replied when I asked what this or that dance-gesture meant, “It’s a personal feeling. Isn’t it better that you don’t get anything in advance? It’s all up to the viewer.” Autumn blazes nakedly, and so the artist veils it by painting in a mist.

Even nowadays I still hope somehow to go “deeper” into art, as if by staring at the reverse side of my reproduction of “Farm Road” I could discover a more chthonic slice of earth. Were I a trifle more intelligent, could I interpret beauty instead of merely describing it, then no doubt I would “learn” or “realize” increasingly, in much the same way that a maiko’s crimson collar gets embroidered with ever more silver thread, until it comes time for her to give up her youth and become a geiko…

Well, I will now try to go deeper just the same.

Do you remember what Zeami said about the expression of demonic roles? Even then the actor should appear to be holding a branch of flowers. And the man who painted Helga so faithfully and secretly is nothing if not a flowery demon. The biographer Meryman sees a connection, as do I, between that famous portrait Wyeth did of his friend and neighbor Karl Kuerner — a sad, absent, hard yet tender-lipped face inspecting us sidelong from beneath two meathooks — and the artist’s following admission: “There’s grace in my work like spring flowers. But there’s some harshness, too. I’m a coarse man, really. I’m a strange combination of delicacy — fragile, in another world — and brutality.”

When he first began to notice Helga, she was taking care of Karl, who was dying from leukemia. Her English was accented; and she and Karl sometimes sang German songs together.

“Nobody knows her,” Wyeth described her. “She’s an enigma. She hovers over the land she lives on.”

And he took precautions (at least so runs the legend) that not even his wife knew her — for fifteen years.

In “Letting Her Hair Down,” the first Helga nude, which has been described (wrongly in my opinion) as comparable to the nudes of the fourteen-year-old Finnish girl Siri Erickson (“the same slight coarseness” — I see no coarseness at all — “the same strength, the same defiance, but diluted by a feeling of come-hither”), Helga sits against a dark wall which is constituted of the thick woolen fibers which make up Wyeth’s earth, and her skin exists somewhere between youth and early middle age; it seems to be altering even as we see it, recapitulating the transience of a Kawabata heroine. She gazes to our left, not quite grimly almost-smiling, perhaps shy or amused. The milky light on her upper breasts gives meaning to the yellow-white blankness of the open window. A solar medallion hangs on a dark ribbon just over her collarbone. Her left breast protrudes freely, while the wristbone of her right arm, folded across the left, cuts into the right breast beneath the nipple. Her hair is a stunning stiffness of yellow and whitish-yellow wires of light. Returning to her face, I now see on it a softer expression of patience and sweetness; her rather thick lips appear to be smiling more — an illusion which perhaps only I experience, unlike the viewer of a Noh mask which changes angle. What caused this impression? First, like most human beings, I sought out the human gaze, which Wyeth has slightly withheld from me. Then the softness of Helga’s form gradually made my aquaintance, like the softness of the barn-darkness itself; and so my judgment of Helga’s expression was altered.